Pressure is inevitable at work. Now and then, we find ourselves dealing with an office situation where we have too much on our plate but have so little time. This and similar scenarios can cause employees to feel high levels of stress and pressure, which can hurt your team’s performance more than you realize.
Excessive stress or pressure could turn your team members unproductive or compromise the quality of their outputs. Worse, they could feel demotivated, and the constant feelings of anxiety and panic brought by stress could further slow them down.
As a manager, it is your job to make sure all your team members can ease their stress and develop their personal resilience. In this post we offer tips to help your team maintain composure and cope better with stress and pressure in the workplace.
This may be easier said than done, especially when tasks come in all at once or when your employees feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that they have to do.
However, there are ways to help develop awareness about the situation and practice concentration techniques. You could recommend the following work productivity tips to your members:
Although the individual requirements of tasks may vary, it’s still advisable that your team comes up with an overall plan. It can serve as everyone’s guide on how to proceed with the work assignment systematically.
You could consider making a checklist to help your group see the resources you will need, your estimated time allotment for each activity, item, or section, and other relevant details.
You might have come across a situation when an employee reached out to you for help regarding multiple high-priority tasks. Advise your employees to resist the urge to use their juggling skills – think of a juggler throwing several balls into the air and trying to catch them all with their two hands. Who knows when somebody is going to drop one of those balls?
To help you organize your schedule, you could discuss with your team which ones are the most urgent that needs to be addressed first. As a manager, you should help your members sort the urgent tasks from the less critical ones.
Procrastination is an often-used defense mechanism, which only adds to work pressure in the long run as unfinished tasks keep mounting.
You need to remind employees that getting started is the hardest part, but when they get past that first step, the rest becomes more manageable.
Life coaches highlight the need for balance in everything that we do. The same principle of life balance applies to work.
Not only is it healthy to pause and rest once in a while, but it’s also an effective way for your team to develop a fresh perspective on what they could do to improve their output or performance at work.
Remind employees who are handling a complex task that they are not supposed to do it all at once or else, their mind and body will eventually feel the stress.
Instead, they need to take time to divide significant functions into more manageable components. It might help if you set mini-deadlines so that your team could work at a more comfortable pace.
Working on group projects requires that everyone is on the same page – meaning everyone has the same understanding of the project’s end goals and the means to achieve them. Otherwise, the team might encounter delays and uncertainties.
Be ready to communicate to your team all the essential aspects of the task and clear any concern or clarification they might have. You could take advantage of leadership and training seminars in the Philippines to help you discover appropriate strategies for communicating with your team.
Once your team has a game plan ready, you should stick to it and evaluate how well or how poorly it worked. That way, you can identify the most effective strategies to adopt, while discarding the inefficient ones.
As a manager, you need to cultivate a healthy, positive work environment for your team. Your employees will find it easier to meet their productivity numbers if you help them manage their workload without unnecessary stress or pressure.
By getting proper training on managing chaos, you could transfer valuable know-how and skills to your employees, so they, too, can become better at handling work pressure.
Filed Under Leadership & Management
